Posts Tagged: design

At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier reviews a new collection that gathers posters for productions of Shakespeare from around the world. This collection has posters from fifty-five countries, ranging from the earliest advertisements for Shakespeare’s plays into productions from the present day.

In a fascinating article for the Design Observer Group, Steven Heller shares some beautiful book jackets from the Weimar Republic: a veritable outpouring of artistry backed by young liberals pushing the boundaries of acceptability to look for art wholly original.

Mark Danielewski talks about the "maddening energy of violence" and why he’s writing a 27–volume novel, starting with his first 850-page installment in the series, The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May. ...more

Holding it in your hand now, we hope it feels familiar and warm, at once reminding you of the great history of The Review, while also giving you a sense that you’re being handed the very future of writing and art.

Cover designer Peter Mendelsund has released two new books about cover design. Cover collects many of the images Mendelsund has designed over his career and What We See When We Read explores the relationship between cover art and the books behind it.

Librarian Justin Wadland attempts to answer the question “What is the future of libraries?” at the Los Angeles Review of Books by reading three recent books about them. He suggests the future of libraries depends on our relationship with them. He also explains that the question is in no way simple:

Flooded with data as we are, each day brings even more innovations and technologies to help us mine, sort, and generate even more information.

For those of us who haven’t glanced at e.e. cummings since high school, it’s easy to forget that literature is a visual medium. When we think about reading, our minds often go straight to content. But rockstar cover designer Peter Mendelsund’s masterful work of phenomenology, What We See When We Read (Random House), minces popular conceptions of reading into scattered piles of type.

London-based artist Jamie Kennan has designed covers for books by Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, and Vladimir Nabokov. In an interview with It’s Nice That, Kennan talks about why he loves designing book covers:

Designing a book cover is great because you can treat it as a piece of packaging, a mini poster, corporate identity, something to use illustration on, or photography, be purely typographical, figurative or conceptual with just the right amount of type to play around with, have complete ownership; and even if you mess up totally, nobody dies.

“By adding a Twitter-like interface layer to Highlights, Findings gives e-books an innovative edge on their paperbound ancestors: Here’s a social network that literally lets you actively read over other bookworms’ shoulders and watch their thought processes coalesce in real time.”

This Atlantic article explores the “alternate realities” imagined by one Steven M. Johnson. The “inventor-cartoonist” has had many transformations since his design-beginnings back in the 1970s. Over the years his focus has moved from the purely “funny, funky or silly,” to tackling social issues; from designs that could be “actual, useful products,” to Utopian ideas.

While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains some of the most sinister glyphs I’ve ever seen.

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